Doris Lessing - The Sun Between Their Feet - Collected African Stories Volume Two

‘Go away,’ he said. ‘Go away, Michele.’

‘I have come to see you,’ said Michele. ‘I have brought you a present.’

The Captain slowly turned over. There was Michele, a cheerful ghost in the dark room. ‘You fool,’ he said. ‘You messed everything up. What did you paint those crosses for?’

‘It was a hospital,’ said Michele. ‘In a village there is a hospital, and on the hospital the Red Cross, the beautiful Red Cross – no?’

‘I was nearly court-martialled.’

‘It was my fault,’ said Michele. ‘I was drunk.’

‘I was responsible.’

‘How could you be responsible when I did it? But it is all over. Are you better?’

‘Well, I suppose these crosses saved your life.’

‘I did not think,’ said Michele. ‘I was remembering the kindness of the Red Cross people when we were prisoners.’

‘Oh shut up, shut up, shut up.’

‘I have brought you a present.’

The Captain peered through the dark. Michele was holding up a picture. It was of a native woman with a baby on her back, smiling sideways out of the frame.

Michele said: ‘You did not like the haloes. So this time, no haloes. For the Captain – no Madonna.’ He laughed. ‘You like it? It is for you. I painted it for you.’

‘God damn you!’ said the Captain.

‘You do not like it?’ said Michele, very hurt.

The Captain closed his eyes. ‘What are you going to do next?’ he asked tiredly.

Michele laughed again. ‘Mrs Pannerhurst, the lady of the General, she wants me to paint her picture in her white dress. So I paint it.’

‘You should be proud to.’

‘Silly bitch. She thinks I am good. They know nothing -savages. Barbarians. Not you, Captain, you are my friend. But these people, they know nothing.’

The Captain lay quiet. Fury was gathering in him. He thought of the General’s wife. He disliked her, but he had known her well enough.

‘These people,’ said Michele. ‘They do not know a good picture from a bad picture. I paint, I paint, this way, that way. There is the picture – I look at it and laugh inside myself.’ Michele laughed out loud. ‘They say, he is a Michelangelo, this one, and try to cheat me out of my price. Michele -Michelangelo – that is a joke, no?’

The Captain said nothing.

‘But for you I painted this picture to remind you of our good times with the village. You are my friend. I will always remember you.’

The Captain turned his eyes sideways in his head and stared at the black girl. Her smile at him was half innocence, half malice.

‘Get out,’ he said suddenly.

Michele came closer and bent to see the Captain’s face. ‘You wish me to go?’ He sounded unhappy. ‘You saved my life. I was a fool that night. But I was thinking of my offering to the Madonna – I was a fool, I say it myself. I was drunk, we are fools when we are drunk.’

‘Get out of here,’ said the Captain again.

For a moment the white bandage remained motionless. Then it swept downwards in a bow. Michele turned towards the door.

‘And take that bloody picture with you.’

Silence. Then, in the dim light, the Captain saw Michele reach out for the picture, his white head bowed in profound obeisance. He straightened himself and stood to attention, holding the picture with one hand, and keeping the other stiff down his side. Then he saluted the Captain.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and he turned and went out of the door with the picture.

The Captain lay still. He felt – what did he feel? There was a pain under his ribs. It hurt to breathe. He realized he was unhappy. Yes, a terrible unhappiness was filling him, slowly, slowly. He was unhappy because Michele had gone. Nothing had ever hurt the Captain in all his life as much as that mocking Yes, sir. Nothing. He turned his face to the wall and wept. But silently. Not a sound escaped him, for the fear the nurses might hear.

Yes, but it was only recently, when it became clear that Aunt Maud really could not last much longer, that people began to ask all those questions which should have been asked, it seems now, so long ago.

Or perhaps it is the other way about: Aunt Maud, suddenly finding that innumerable nieces and nephews and cousins were beginning to take an interest in her, asking her to meet interesting people, was so disturbed to find herself pushed into the centre of the stage where she felt herself to be out of place, that she took to her bed where she could tactfully die?

Even here, lying on massed pillows, like a small twig that has been washed up against banks of smooth white sand, she is not left in peace. Distant relations who have done no more than send her Christmas cards once a year come in to see her, sit by her bed for hours at a time, send her flowers. But why? It is not merely that they want to know what London in the Nineties was like for a young woman with plenty of money, although they wake her to ask: ‘Do tell us, do you remember the Oscar Wilde affair?’ Her face puckers in a worried look, and she says: ‘Oscar Wilde? What? Oh yes, I read such an interesting book, it is in the library.’

Perhaps Aunt Maud herself sees that pretty vivacious girl (there is a photograph of her in an album somewhere) as a character in a historical play. But what is that question which it seems everyone comes to ask, but does not ask, leaving at length rather subdued, even a little exasperated – perhaps because it is not like Aunt Maud to suggest unanswerable questions?

Where did it all begin? Some relation returned from a long holiday, and asking casually after the family, said: ‘What! Aunt Maud still alive? Isn’t she gone yet?’ Is that how people began asking: ‘Well, but how old is she? Eighty? Ninety?’ ‘Nonsense, she can’t be ninety.’

‘But she says she remembers …’ And the names of old ‘incidents’ crop up, the sort of thing one finds in dusty books of memoirs. They were another world. It seems impossible that living people can remember them, especially someone we know so well.

‘She remembers earlier than that. She told me once – it must be twenty years ago now – of having left home years before the Boer War started. You can work that out for yourself.’

‘Even that only makes her seventy – eighty perhaps. Eighty is not old enough to get excited about.’

‘The Crimean War …’ But now they laugh. ‘Come, come, she’s not a hundred!’

No, she cannot be as much as that, but thirty years ago, no less, an old frail lady climbed stiffly but jauntily up the bank of a dried-up African river, where she was looking after a crowd of other people’s children on a picnic, and remarked: ‘My old bones are getting creaky.’ Then she bought herself an ancient car. It was one of the first Ford models, and she went rattling in it over bad corrugated roads and even over the veld, if there were no roads. And no one thought it extraordinary. Just as one did not think of her as an old maid, or a spinster, so one did not think of her as an old lady.

And then there was the way she used to move from continent to continent, from family to family, as a kind of unpaid servant. For she had no money at all by then: her brother the black sheep died and she insisted on giving up all her tiny capital to pay his debts. It was useless of course; he owed thousands, but no one could persuade her against it. ‘There are some things one has to do,’ she said. Now, lying in bed she says: ‘One doesn’t want to be a nuisance,’ in her small faded voice; the same voice in which she used to announce, and not so very long ago: ‘I am going to South America as companion to Mrs Fripp – she is so very very kind.’ For six months, then, she was prepared to wait hand and foot on an old lady years younger than herself simply for the sake of seeing South America? No, we can no longer believe it. We are forced to know that the thought of her aches and pains put warmth into Mrs Fripp’s voice when she asked Aunt Maud to go with her.